UCI's Kyle Good Done Good in Online Video Contest

After clicking the "play" symbol on 133 YouTube video submissions, judges selected the entry above by UC Irvine student Kyle Good as one of three finalists for the X Prize Foundation's "What's Your Crazy Green Idea?" online video contest. That could bring him a $25,000 check when the winner is announced next week.

Good's "The Capacitor Challenge," which calls for the creation of a new battery storage "ultra capacitor" device to power everything from i-Pods to electric cars, received the most votes out of 4,000 cast by members of the public who checked out the final three nominated vids.

"If chosen, my idea could become the next energy and enviroment X Prize competition with a $10 million incentive to anyone who can achieve the goals specified," Good, a second-year film and media studies major, told UCI's Zot!Wire in November.

Weeks ago, the X Foundation solicited from the public their best ideas for a specific prize that would solve a world-wide problem and benefit humanity. "Videos were judged on creativity, viability of concept, degree of the concept's revolutionary impact and concept innovation and inventiveness," says the X Foundation, whose most publicized achievement was funding the construction of a private spaceship. (Somebody call Lance Bass!)

Good has stiff competition. Jonathan Dreher of Cambridge, MA, would offer a prize for reduction of home energy consumption in American homes. The prize proposed by Alan Silva of Roy, UT, would go to the developer of energy-indepedent homes that exist completely off the grid. Those seem so similar Kyle's should stand out in comparison and make him a shoo-in for the 25 large, no?

We'll find out when the announcement is made at 5 a.m. Feb. 5--Jeez, are these the Oscar nominations or something?--right 'chere. It's promised that if you log on, you'll be able to see the expression on the face of the announced winner in real time. Just hope the losers do not blow up the Earth.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.